One Way to Take the Real Red Pill
Most everyone knows of the infamous Red Pill from the blockbuster hit, The Matrix. Neo, the protagonist played by Keanu Reeves, is presented with the option: Take the Blue Pill to remain in blissful ignorance of a simulated reality or take the Red Pill to see the hard truth of a machine created world. While not an actual “pill” and, as far as I know, no robots on the other side, there is a way for you and I to reach a similar hard truth of reality for those who are brave enough to want to take it.
But first, why would Neo, or any of us, ultimately want to take the Red Pill? If we’re perfectly happy with the results we have, require no further growth or don’t strive to make a larger impact, then the Blue Pill sounds like the way to go. And you might even want to save some time and skip the rest of this blog because now you know what side of this I am on.
Meaningful change, for Neo or ourselves, isn’t made in the blissful wonderings of the Blue Pill. Without getting down to the harsh reality of things, little change can be made. It’d be like wanting to improve a presentation while exclusively basking in positive feedback. Or purely thinking the world isn’t fair because you’re such a “nice guy”, you deserve to close more deals!
While positive feedback is great and I hope you’re authentically nice, it doesn’t do much by way of actually changing anything. Working or living that way will result in incremental changes at best. So how do we take the Red Pill? That is, how do we find the hard truth of reality where we can make the biggest impact?
It’s a little harder than just taking some hypothetical medication. It takes Hunting Discomfort of a very special sort: Putting yourself at the source of the situation. Reflecting to find where, why, and how YOU caused it and can do something about it:
Hunting for where in that presentation you can strengthen your delivery.
Hunting for what you did specifically that led to that deal not going through.
Hunting for why you’re in whatever situation you’re in to begin with.
When you take a hard look at it all coming from you as the source, you start to see where real improvements can be made. Does this mean that in the scheme of things all the global problems, societal issues or business shortcomings are your fault? No. But when you look at anything as coming from, or being caused by you, as opposed to being at the mercy or effect of something, you can see the hard reality of what you can actually do about it. And it's the doing something about it that matters most.
Every week we do #NoMatterWhat Challenges in our Facebook Community. They’re designed to shake up your status quo in small ways to improve you and those around you. This week the Challenge is to find something you don’t like and do something about it. For example, if you don't like global warming, walk to work. If you don’t like how many sales you made last week, double your cold calls. You get the idea. It’s just a little practice to take the Red Pill in small doses to build yourself up to something bigger.
While Neo was presented with a once-in-a-lifetime decision with which direction he wanted to go, we constantly have the Red Pill at our disposal. At any moment we can make the hard choice to see ourselves as the source of the situation and do something about it. Spoiler alert, if Neo took the Blue Pill there wouldn’t be much of a movie…
Now it’s your turn, which pill will you take?